


A Midnight Clear

by littlereyofsunlight



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), F/M, Steggy Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 06:11:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13184001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlereyofsunlight/pseuds/littlereyofsunlight
Summary: He’s been out of the ice for a while now, and Steve Rogers has his routine down. He works with S.H.I.E.L.D., and sometimes the Avengers, and he’s catching up on everything he missed as a Capsicle. Visiting Peggy Carter, his wartime love, in her nursing home has turned out to be his favorite activity—and his most painful, since she hardly remembers him. But he wouldn’t miss seeing her on Christmas Eve, not for the world.





	A Midnight Clear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rachlovesligers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachlovesligers/gifts).



> Posted as part of the 2017 Steggy Secret Santa exchange.

Steve supposes there are some benefits to being a national hero as he greets the front desk staff at Peggy’s nursing home with a nod and a wave. He’s been there so much, they’ve stopped checking him in for each visit and just let him make his way to her room. He always calls ahead, anyways, so they know to expect him. And so he can avoid upsetting her on a bad day.

Helen, Steve’s favorite nurse, gives him a big smile from underneath the Santa hat she’s wearing. “Steve,” she calls over her shoulder as he passes, “be sure to stop by on your way out. Paul brought in cupcakes for Christmas!”

He gives her a salute before turning back to Peggy’s half-open door, which has a cheery little wreath on it. He knocks lightly and waits for her thin, quavery voice to say “It’s open.” To be honest, it wasn’t her looks that had surprised him the most about elderly Peggy, it was how different her voice was now. She’d lost all steadiness, and with it, it felt like the strength of her convictions. Steve knew that aging robbed people of so many things, but it seemed most cruel to rob Peggy of this.

Still, he smiles when he pokes his head through the door. “How’s my best girl today?” he asks, hovering in the doorway to see how this will play out. 

“Oh,” she says with a little surprise, speaking from her bed where she’s reclined against a mountain of pillows, her brow furrowed, “you’ll think I’ve completely lost the plot, I’m afraid, but I can’t seem to remember who you are.”

Smile still on his face, Steve droops a bit inwardly. There are two kinds of good days. Days when Peggy remembers him, and they can chat like old friends, even if he winds up filling in many of the the gaps in the stories they recount to one another. And days like today, when she isn’t agitated, but she’s also just not Peggy. These kinds of good days are the loneliest days for Steve since he came out of the ice two years ago.

“I’m Steve,” he says, ever patient. “We’ve met before.”

Her expression is quizzical, but she still gives him a polite “We have? How lovely.”

“Are you up for a visit?”

“You want a visit? With me?” A smile breaks out over her wrinkled face. She wriggles a little deeper into her pillows and pats the arm of the chair next to her bed. “Young man, come right in.”

He settles in and takes a look at the spine of the book she’d cast aside. “Enjoying it?” He points.

She looks down, perplexed again. “You know, I’m not sure. It’s difficult for me to focus just now.” She smoothes a small, time-worn hand over the back cover. “I’m told I’ve read it before, but I really can’t remember.”

Steve takes the book in his hands. “Well, there’s a movie, too.”

“There is?”

He nods, tracing the embossed letters of the title. “You told me your grandkids loved this series.”

“I did?” Her voice is so small. She flutters her hands, unsure of what to say. She looks into his eyes, and Steve wills her to remember, to place his face firmly in context of a war—a lifetime ago for her—and recall a promised dance, a bitter fight, the taste of whisky and waxy lipstick and tears. Something, anything.

But Peggy’s warm brown eyes are blank.

Steve shrugs. “No big deal,” he says brightly, feeling the emptiness down to his toes.

She offers him a sad smile. “Would you like something to drink?”

He doesn’t have a chance to answer, though, because at the same moment, Peggy bursts through the door.

She’s panting a little, wearing modern clothes, a strawberry blonde wig. And she’s young. Not a day older than when he’d last seen her, if he had to guess. But it’s Peggy, Steve has no doubt before she’s even spoken a word. When he realizes this, he’s out of the chair and across the room in a moment, repulsed by the person in the bed who is clearly not Peggy. Now that the real deal is standing in front of him, he doesn’t know how he could have ever thought that imposter was his Margaret Carter.

His Peggy had looked annoyed, but when he moves to her side without any prompting, she presses her lips together in a grim smile and gives him a curt little nod before turning on her heel. He follows closely, his heart in his throat. 

They wind their way through the corridors of the nursing home, away from reception and the nurses’ station, back towards the cafeteria, through the swinging kitchen door, past Javier the dishwasher, sleeping at his chair, all the dishes stacked and gleaming next to the sink. They walk past the deep freeze, past Lupe in her kitchen manager’s office and through the small laundry used only for table linens, where there is another door, to the building’s south emergency stairwell. 

All the while, Steve feels like a balloon barely tethered down; he could float away at any moment. This is Peggy. This is how she moves, with a sureness that wherever she’s headed, it’s the right way. She clearly has a plan, even if she hasn’t shared it with him. There are no less than three weapons hidden on her person, he can tell even though the methods of concealment have changed a bit in the intervening decades. She’s dashing ahead and trusting him to follow. This is his Peggy. His palms itch to grab for one of her hands, absurdly he has the intense desire to squire her up these stairs she’s currently climbing two at a clip. If he picked her up on this next landing, just for a quick celebratory twirl or three, would she indulge him?

“No time for any of that, Rogers,” she says, pushing faster towards the roof access.

Those are the first words she says to him. His grin threatens to crack his cheeks. This is his Peggy.

She opens the door onto a moonless sky and the wind whips down the stairwell. “I’ll explain, I promise,” she tells him. She walks to the edge of the roof, reaches her hand back to him, searches his face with her eyes for any hint of reluctance. He knows she finds none. “You need to come with me, Steve.”

The melody of a Christmas carol floats on the air from the organ in the church across the street. The wintry night clouds her breath while she waits for him, her gaze steady, her grin confident and just a little wicked.

It smells like it might snow. He hasn’t felt this alive since New York. He takes her hand, and together they jump. 

 

Some time later, they’ve ditched the nondescript clunker that carried them north through D.C.’s notorious traffic, out of the snarls and slowdowns of a holiday weekend commute, and are now speeding along a highway on the eastern edge of the Adirondacks in a sleek little sports car sure to turn Nat’s head, if she were around.

Peggy’s been quiet, focused on driving, and Steve is still just stupid enough from the stunning developments of the evening, he hasn’t yet pressed her for that promised explanation. In fact, he’s just been staring at her since before they passed Poughkeepsie. Every so often, her lips quirk up in a smirk that lets him know she knows, and is enjoying the attention. 

“I miss the red,” he says, studying the curve of those lips.

She cuts her eyes over to him, amused. “Doesn’t quite go with the hair.” She checks her rearview automatically. “But, now that we’re away from the major metropolitan areas, I suppose I don’t need this anymore.” She reaches up and pulls off her wig and the cap underneath, throwing them over her shoulder into the car’s miniscule backseat. Underneath, her hair has been marshalled into two french braids and pinned up at the back. In the darkness, Steve can just make out the baby fine hairs escaping at her temples and the nape of her pale neck. 

Peggy rolls her shoulders and sighs. Steve remembers the gesture, from before. When they were in the middle of a tense mission, and the wait to make their next move stretched on interminably, Peggy would always do exactly that. He suppresses the urge to reach out and curl a tendril of that escaping hair around his finger, something he’d done in the past—not on a mission, but after, when they had a brief moment to themselves. 

“I suppose you’re going to tell me what’s going on at some point,” Steve says with no urgency in his voice. His stomach growls. “Maybe over dinner somewhere? We are stopping for dinner soon, right?” He gives her a big, dopey grin. “I didn’t know I was gonna be kidnapped this evening. I would have carbed-up.”

Peggy snorts at his dumb joke. “I’m not kidnapping you.” She checks the rear mirror again and signals to move into the right lane. “We can stop off the next exit, there’s a diner.” She glances at him. “I’ll tell you what I can there.”

That’s enough to satisfy Steve for the moment. There’s a voice at the back of his mind, telling him he’s an idiot for throwing caution to the wind here, that he should have demanded proof that this Peggy is the real Peggy before running off to God-knows-where with her. That voice sounds suspiciously like Natasha. Except when it’s calling him an idiot punk, then it sounds like Bucky. But Steve doesn’t care. He knows this is Peggy, knows it in his bones. And if there is something wrong here, well, at least he’s with her.

 

The diner is one of those fifties throwbacks plopped onto the corner just off the thruway sometime in the eighties—Steve had missed both decades, of course, but he was learning—all shiny, curved metal exterior and plastic-and-carpet green and peach interior. It’s open 24 hours, and despite the late hour there are several tables filled. A weary family obviously on a holiday road trip in one corner booth, a couple in their early twenties holding hands in the window by the front door, a gaggle of teenage girls at the counter giggling over the only busboy working this evening. 

Peggy leads them over to a two-top away from the door and sits so she’s facing any possible entrances into the building. A waitress straight out of central casting takes their orders and then leaves them alone. Peggy takes the opportunity to pass him a phone. 

“What’s this?”

She gives him a look. “I know you’ve been back long enough to know what phones look like these days. My number’s in there, should we get separated.”

He shrugs and reaches out for it. “They gave me one for work. I’m always forgetting it at home, though.”

“I know. If you’d had it on you tonight I would have made you pitch it out the window before we left the city.”

Steve raises an eyebrow. “Because a call from S.H.I.E.L.D. would ruin the mood of our reunion, or…?”

She sighs then clamps her lips together as the waitress returns with their coffees, the look in her eye warning Steve not to push the issue in front of the civilian. He knows that look well. Now he’s stunned to realize all the little details he’d forgotten about her, about how they are together, in the small time they’d been apart. They are flooding back now.

After the waitress steps away, Peggy continues. “S.H.I.E.L.D. is compromised.” She holds up a hand, cutting off the questions forming on his lips. “It’s Hydra. After the war, the U.S. government recruited Nazi scientists for their ‘strategic utility.’ Zola was among them, and he eventually weaseled his way into the organization Howard and I built.” She stops for a moment, the admission weighing on her. “I still don’t know how deep it goes, but I have known it’s been going on for a very long time. I’ve not yet been successful in my attempts to weed it out. I’ve come to you now because I have reason to believe that Pierce himself is involved. I couldn’t bear to leave you in that nest of vipers any longer.”

The waitress comes back with their orders, her cheery attempts at small talk falling flat while Steve and Peggy stare at each other across the table, both of them stone faced.

When she leaves, Steve clears his throat. “Why did you leave me there at all?”

Peggy looks as though she’s been slapped.

He keeps his voice even, not wanting to attract any attention. “You’ve been keeping a pretty close eye on me, sounds like.” He doesn’t wait for her confirmation. “So you know I’ve been visiting her nearly every day since I took the post in D.C.” He takes up his knife and fork and sets to cutting up the meatloaf in front of him. “That’s about, what, five hundred and forty days of thinking you were…” here he takes a moment to gather his composure, his chiseled jaw clenched, “gone but not gone.” His voice is tight, eyes both hard and hurt. He looks up into her face. “Whatever torture Hydra could have come up with for me, it would never be worse than that.”

“Steve, I,” Peggy’s voice is thick with emotion, and she doesn’t finish whatever thought is in her head.

He shrugs and starts eating his dinner. It tastes of nothing, but he eats the whole meal, just like a good super soldier should. Peggy just pushes hers around her plate. That’s wildly out of character for her, but he’s a little too angry just now to say anything about it. So she feels bad, okay. He’s not exactly walking on sunshine at this moment, either. 

Eventually, she pushes her plate away. Steve looks at it, then at her, head tilted “Oh, go on,” she says, annoyed and sad and fond all at once.

He eats all her fries and coleslaw along with half her sandwich while they sit in tense silence. Their waitress wraps up the second half to go, Peggy pays the bill with cash and they head back out to her car.

He waits until she’s steered them back onto the thruway, still heading north, before he speaks again. “Okay. S.H.I.E.L.D. Hydra. Tell me the rest.”

Peggy’s foot is heavy on the pedal as she drives them up 87, her hands gripping the steering wheel tightly. She takes a deep breath. “We’ve got a few hours to our destination, so I’ll go back the beginning.” She glances over at him, and he nods.

“Right.” Another breath. “In 1947, Howard came to me to say that he’d been unable to replicate Erskine’s serum exactly. But he was nearly positive he’d hit upon a formula that would give similar results. He’d been working on this alone, entirely outside—and in fact, against—the government’s discretion. So, we tested it.”

Comprehension dawns on Steve’s face. “You tested it.”

“It was a successful trial,” Peggy acknowledges. “But Howard and I came to the conclusion that it could not be used again. The Soviet threat was growing, and the game had changed so significantly since the war. We couldn’t know how such a powerful tool would be wielded, in this government’s hands or another’s.”

Steve had been watching the road, still pissed enough that looking at her was difficult, but this admission has him watching her again, intently, studying the planes of her face as shadows and light from cars passing on the other side of the thruway play over it. Peggy is like him. It’s what’s allowed her to survive into the next century looking just the same as he remembers. It’s shocking to consider; while he was in stasis and the world was changing around him, she was in it, fighting for the better world they both believed could be, like he’d thought. But she’d had to go into hiding when the unintended effect of Stark’s serum—the fact that Peggy had stopped aging—became apparent. That was when she and Howard had trained and installed her double. Peggy had been in a sort of stasis, too, this whole time. Too far removed to do anything, but still so closely enmeshed with the organization she founded, able to sense the growing threat, and knowledgeable enough to uncover the rot at its core. 

At least Steve had been able to sleep through such a nightmare becoming real.

 

They exit the thruway near Champlain and take a state highway that runs parallel to the Canadian border, crossing the water—and with it, the state line—at Rouses Point. Then Peggy points the car south, and almost an hour later they’ve traversed most of the islands that make up the archipelago in the middle of Lake Champlain. It’s begun to snow as Peggy pulls off onto a hidden drive, taking them far away from the main road. 

“Sorry for the extra time,” Peggy says as they park in front of a modest cabin somewhere along the shore of the lake. “I’d meant for us to catch the ferry near Plattsburgh, but with all that traffic back in D.C., we missed the last one by an hour.” 

“Where are we?” Steve asks, taking in the surrounding trees and shoreline, the dark windows of the little house. The sliver of a moon visible beyond the trees limns snow-covered branches and the roof of the cabin in silver. The night is so quiet and still Steve can practically hear each snowflake as it lands. 

“Vermont,” Peggy answers. She takes her bag out of the trunk, clicks the key fob until her car locks with a beep, then goes inside.

Steve takes a few more minutes to look around, every exhalation a puff of steam in the frigid air. This was a little different than how he’d pictured his night. He’d planned on renting some of those Star movies people had been telling him he needed to see. “Right, of course. Vermont.” He follows her into the house.

She’s made quick work of turning on the lights and turning up the thermostat by the time he divests himself of his jacket and boots. The house is all one room, with a lofted space for sleeping, accessible by ladder. The main living area is spacious, the kitchen modern, the couch, where Steve imagines he’ll sleep tonight, positively giant. He wanders into the space between it and the fireplace, still taking everything in. “So,” he says, eventually, “this is nice.”

Peggy is busying herself with something in the kitchen. She comes out and hands him a sheaf of newsprint and a box of long matches. “The electric heat in this place can only get us so far, I’m afraid. Firewood is just behind you, please make yourself useful. I need to fix myself a bite to eat. I should have had more back at the diner. Now I’m famished. Do you need anything?”

He shrugs. “I could always eat, but don’t put yourself out for me.”

Peggy looks at him for a beat too long.

“Er,” he reddens when his own words reach his ears, “you know what I mean.” She raises a single eyebrow at him, and Steve wonders just what could possibly be going through her mind right now. He feels a lick of heat in his belly, then the moment between them passes and Peggy returns to the kitchen. Steve turns back to the supplies she’s given him.

He hasn’t built a fire since before he went into the ice. He remembers how, but there are some false starts. It’s good for him to have something to busy his hands with while he continues to think through all that Peggy’s told him today. It takes him a while to build up something good and big, something that will warm them for a while. It’s a far cry from the little flames that had warmed their coffee in the field. Then, no matter how cold, they’d had to keep the flames low to avoid detection. On one particularly memorable night, one of the rare occasions Peggy had been with them on a mission, she’d huddled up to him for warmth. She’d had to best Dugan in a one-armed push up contest for that dubious honor, though. 

Peggy—his Peggy!—has been here all along. He can’t help but think of what that means. An additional seventy years of experience. Seventy years of living a life, one unencumbered by aging, while he slept under a sheet of ice. He keeps coming back to that. He’s angry she didn't find him once his miraculous return was announced, since she had the resources to learn that it was truly him and not some marketing ploy. He’s actually furious about that, but he knows it’s something he can get past. 

But the seventy years that stretch between them? Even when he was the sickly, scrappy pipsqueak and she was the brilliant agent at Camp Lehigh, the gulf between them had never felt this wide to Steve.

 

Once they’ve eaten again and Steve is washing up, Peggy leans her elbows on the kitchen island and fixes him with a shrewd look. “Steve,” she says, her tone a bit chary, “are you all right?”

He sets the plate he’d been rinsing into the dishrack and takes up a tea towel to start drying. He has to remind himself to relax his shoulders once he notices how close to his ears they’ve gotten since she asked the question. He reaches for a glass, but thinks better of it. His hands feel tense, too. He puts the towel down again and, since he can’t trust himself not to break anything if he attempts to stall with further tidying just now, turns to face her. 

“I know this is a lot to take in—” she starts.

Steve stops her with a look. “I thought I’d sacrificed my life to take out Hydra. I wake up and the whole world has changed several times over, most of my friends are dead, and aliens attack my city. That was a lot to take in, Peggy. This…” he opens his arms, palms up, and shrugs before dropping them back to his sides. “This I don’t even know how to start processing.” She tries to speak again, but he can’t stop himself now that he’s started. 

“The thing is, though, I don’t know if I even care. I’ve thrown myself into the work, because it’s something I know how to do. It’s what I’m good at. Hell, I’m even having fun leading that tac team, sometimes. But now, with you back, it’s clear how much none of that matters to me. It was all just to pass the time.” He looks into her eyes, searching. He takes a deep breath. “I threw myself into working with S.H.I.E.L.D. because I thought I’d missed my chance at a life with you.”

It feels like his heart is simultaneously lodged in his throat and beating faster than it ever had during an asthma attack. He’s laid it all on the table for her, something he’s dreamed about doing a thousand times since he woke up. In those dreams, he’d never imagined feeling so nauseous afterwards. 

And Peggy. Peggy is looking at him, still, her eyes shining. She’s gripping the counter so hard her knuckles are white. He doesn’t know how to interpret the look on her face, but her mouth is soft and and her eyes, her gorgeous, brilliant, intelligent brown eyes are locked on his. He starts to feel something like hope.

“Steve, we can’t.”

And then it’s gone.

A fog rushes over him. He rocks back like he’s just taken a punch, but he nods all the same and gives her a half-hearted shrug and an “Okay then.” She looks like she wants to say more, maybe explain, but then thinks better of it. “It’s been a long day,” he mumbles as he shuffles in the direction of the couch. He knew he’d wind up sleeping on it. 

 

Steve tries to sleep, he really makes a good effort. But between the events of the day, all the revelations, and being able to hear every exhalation and shift Peggy makes in her bed in the loft, there’s simply no way it’s happening. The couch is more than comfortable enough, with its slouchy cushions, deep seat and tall back. But the weight of Peggy’s rejection has settled in his gut like a stone and no matter what position he’s in, the pain that radiates is palpable. 

It’s like waking up from the ice all over, the ground under his feet is no longer solid and steady, his path once more unclear. Peggy is lost to him again.

The fire is still going strong, he’d made sure to build it up before burrowing into a nest of the blankets and pillows Peggy provided. He tries to focus on listening to it crackle and pop instead of the sounds from upstairs. It almost works: he can feel his eyelids getting heavy as his breath deepens and slows. 

And then the blankets upstairs rustle more forcefully and he hears her feet hit the floor. As she makes her way down the ladder, he screws his eyes shut tight to resist the urge to peek at her. He counts her steps as she comes down. His brow furrows as she turns, not into the kitchen or towards the bathroom, but in the direction of the couch. Steve tries to keep his breathing deep and even, tries not to let on that he’s still awake. But when he feels her settle by his hip, he can’t help his eyes snapping open to look at her.

Peggy’s taken down her hair from the severe braids. It floats around her shoulders, a wild, tangled mess. She’s breathing hard, he can see the rise and fall of her chest beneath the oversized pajama top she has on. In the firelight, her eyes are burning as she looks at him. 

He reaches for her and she goes to him easily, flowing over him like water, sliding under the blankets until she is pressed fully against his unyielding bulk. She tips her chin up and he can’t wait another second, he covers her mouth with his. Peggy kisses him back with equal fervor. Steve runs his hands up under her top, charting new territory, and she returns the gesture, only she uses her nails to delightful effect. He kisses her and kisses her until they’re both dizzy with it, and still he keeps on kissing her. They have a lot of lost time to make up for.

He stops just long enough to ask “But you said—?”

Peggy bites his lip then soothes the sting with her tongue. “For fuck’s sake, Steve, I’m seventy years older. I never promised I was seventy years wiser.”

His answering laugh is smothered by her insistent, heated kisses.

They’d never had their dance. But for this choreography, Steve finds he has a natural aptitude.


End file.
